[OS X TeX] edit spell check dictionary

[Alan Munn]

At 3:39 PM -0500 1/2/10, Charles Pugh wrote:
>Hello  --
>
>Thanks for the suggestions.  I had never opened a binary.  "Somewhat 
>encoded" is an understatement.  I'd hoped to find a list of words 
>and prune it.  That doesn't look possible currently.
>
>Another idea.  A while ago, was there not a feature of some email 
>programs alerting the writer about being too angry?  Bad words were 
>to be flagged.  I didn't use the feature, just vaguely remember 
>reading about it.  As an add-on to a spell checker it might do what 
>I want.

The autocorrect feature is really the best route to go for this 
particular kind of problem, so if you're using Snow Leopard, that 
would be the easiest route.  If you don't have Snow Leopard, then the 
brilliant little application TypeIt4Me 
<http://www.ettoresoftware.com/products/typeit4me/> is fantastic to 
do this kind of thing.  Also, you can always override any autocorrect 
feature, so you would lose the ability to type 'fro' as a real word.

>
>Newspaper writers could certainly use an "affect" versus "effect" flag.

This particular problem would  require full blown natural language 
processing, both syntactic and semantic, since there's no simple way 
to flag these.  The 'bad word' flags are simply that: they look for 
words independent of context.  Curiously the one with Eudora, which I 
use for mail, flags 'suck' but not 'damn' or 'hell'.   WTF!

Alan


>
>Is there a place at Apple to make such a suggestion?  The Mac forums 
>there seem mainly designed for belly-aching.
>
>Best,  Charles Pugh
>
>On 2-Jan-10, at 11:19 AM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>
>>
>>Am 02.01.2010 um 16:14 schrieb Herbert Schulz:
>>
>>>The problem is that he wants to do the reverse of the usual 
>>>behavior. He doesn't want to add a new word to the spell checker 
>>>but rather remove a word (fro---as in `to and fro') from the 
>>>spelling dictionary so it gets flagged as an error. I don't see a 
>>>way of negating a word already in the dictionary.
>>
>>Ah, I understand now: the "fro" is already in the default system's 
>>dictionary! (And was not added by the user.) The directories 
>>/System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources/<lang>.lproj 
>>contain only binary, i.e., somehow encoded, dictionaries and a DAT 
>>file which probably has rules by which a word is constructed from 
>>its stem form...
>>
>>So Charles has three options: Snow Leopard, or a different speller, 
>>free or shareware or commercial, or trying to choose another 
>>setup/language choice - maybe with some help from Apple via their 
>>Bug Reporter.
>>
>>And an experimental choice: renaming any of the bindict* files in 
>>/System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources/English.lproj 
>>to possibly get rid of this word "fro." Which would make it 
>>necessary to kill the service and restart it afterwards, for 
>>example by logging off and in again, or using the command line...
>>
>>--
>>Greetings
>>
>>  Pete
>>
>>The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they 
>>start selling vacuum cleaners.
>>				- Ernest Jan Plugge
>>
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>
>
>
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-- 
Alan Munn						amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages		Tel. 
	517-355-7491
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824 USA	Fax	517-432-2736